Jon Hassell: Fascinoma
(Jon Hassell, trumpet; Ry Cooder, guitar; Jacky
Terrasson, piano; Ronu Majumdar, bansuri (flute); Rick Cox, guitar, bass clarinet, ; Jamie
Muhoberac, zendrum; Joachim Cooder, drums; Rick Masterson, Rose Okada, tambura.Water Lily
Acoustics WLACS70CD. Dr. Dilip Raval, Bill Lewis, Kavichandran Alexander, prods.;
Kavichandran Alexander, eng. AAD. TT: 60:30.)
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 Jon Hassell has long been associated with the
“ambient” music scene. His best-known album remains his 1980 collaboration with
Brian Eno, Fourth World, Vol 1: Possible Musics [EG Editions 7 CD], in which the
two musicians drew on a variety of world-music sounds, creating a soundscape imbued with a
sustained sense of wonder. The result, unlike many other experiments in exotica, has held
up astonishingly well -- it has an organic feel to it, even if it does sound like
“jungle music on Venus,” as The American Music Guide would have it.
Part of that natural feeling stems from
Hassell’s comfort with African and Asian rhythms. His trumpet tone, when not
electronically processed, sounds like pure Miles Davis -- his near total lack of vibrato,
preference for the lower register, and reliance upon the Harmon mute make him sound
spookily like the dark prince -- but he draws his improvisational style from classical
Indian music. Think of his pieces as ragas -- where the scale or mode plays as important a
part as the melody upon which the piece is based.
This makes him a natural for Kavi
Alexander’s on-going series of “international encounters,” for lack of a
better term. With the exception of Mr. Alexander’s foray into orchestral recording in
Philadelphia, his focus over the last eight years or so has been upon putting musicians
from various cultures together and recording their attempts to create a musical lingua
franca. Some of these collaborations have been fabulously successful, artistically --
V.M Bhatt & Ry Cooder’s A Meeting By the River [WLA-CS-29] or Jerry
Douglas, V.M. Bhatt, & Edgar Meyer’s Bourbon and Rosewater [WLA-CS-47],
just to name the first that spring to mind.
Alexander is a master at microphone
placement, which sounds like a left-handed compliment, but it’s not. Recording is at
least as much art as it is science, and the part of the art that is hardest to master is
microphone placement. Here, Alexander has gone for an unusually reverberant sound for some
instruments, such as the droning tamburas and bass instruments, balancing them with limpid
clarity from Hassell’s trumpet and Ronu Majumdar’s bansuri. Jackie
Terrasson’s piano is recorded midway between these touchpoints -- his frequent use of
the sustain pedal softens his sound and almost turns his instrument into another drone,
except when it is the featured melodic instrument, as on “Suite de Caravan.”
The sound is unique. Strictly speaking,
it’s not realistic -- yet Alexander’s recording technique doesn’t
incorporate multi-tracking. What we’re hearing is a creation of the microphones and
canny placement of the musicians in relation to them. This musical event did happen
in real time, the recording merely offers an otherworldly perspective upon the recorded
event. Hassell’s trumpet sound is rich and breathy, definitely the star here, but in
places he blends his tone to that of flutist Ronu Majumdar, as on “Nature Boy,”
the disc’s opener. The trumpet and flute set up a call and response in which one
sound blends into the other as one phrase fades into another like two ships bobbing into
and out of sight of one another within a fogbank.
Although there is some deep bass on the
recording (zendrum possibly?), Hassell actually is working with small gradations in sound.
This disc doesn’t have the phenomenal dynamic contrast of an audiophile showstopper,
but it offers remarkable tonal shading nonetheless.
There’s an old debater’s
technique in which the more important the information you wish to convey is, the softer
you speak -- that way your opponent has to really listen to understand your point.
Hassell’s music is like that: He speaks volumes without raising his voice.
Perhaps it is the overwhelmingly gentle
nature of this music that fascinates me most. But one thing is for sure, Fascinoma
is like musical medicine -- put it on and the cares and pressures of the outside world
simply disappear. While you can concentrate on the music and the interplay between
musicians, you don’t have to -- the recording creates its own reality that works
extremely well at low volume where it is as much sensed as it is heard outright. Am I
saying that Hassell has achieved the ultimate in what Brian Eno called “music for
dining” -- music as easy to ignore as it is to pay attention to? Not really.
What Hassell and Alexander actually
create on Fascinoma is a separate sonic world -- melodic fragments float into view
before fading away or blending into another instrument’s sound, always held aloft on
a cushion of reverberant sound or the soft drone of tambura, sotto guitar, or rich
bass clarinet. Since all of the songs are standards, the tunes themselves are
recognizable, even if only for an instant as their melodies float to the surface before
fading back into the acoustic.
The most prolonged and, in many ways,
most straightforward presentation is that of “Suite de Caravan,” where Terrasson
and Hassell tease the Tizol/Ellington tune back and forth for 12 minutes in a jagged duet.
As they pass the melody from hand to hand, they keep its momentum going at a gentle,
rocking pace. Like that of a camel, say, methodically meandering across the musical desert
on a world we can only reach through our CD players.
Lucky us.
Press play to begin . . .
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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